Coping with Covid-19: How the fine-wine market is making the best of a tough year
The World of Fine Wine’s auctions and secondary market correspondent,
Chloe Ashton, takes a look at how the pandemic has continued to have an impact on fine-wine saleroom activity during the third quarter
The fine wine market has become comfortable with uncertainty. Since the glory of autumn 2018, which saw the Liv-ex 1,000 index reach record-breaking heights, turmoil of one kind or another has plagued major markets—but the industry and its assets have resisted well.
Exceeding expectations
“Things are less negative than we thought they were going to be,” says Tom Stopford Sackville, CEO of Goedhuis & Co. Speaking to him just before the beginning of the UK’s second lockdown, he nonetheless caveats that as far as London is concerned, while the first stint of staying at home was perhaps a novelty for some customers, who consequently “decided to spoil themselves with nice wines,” the next bout “may have a different effect” on demand levels. British business for Goedhuis through 2020 has nonetheless been good, with the merchant boasting its best-ever August, and a successful October that saw revenues up 15 percent on the “non-Covid-ridden” October of 2019. Brexit seems barely a concern—Stopford Sackville takes the position of “waiting, watching, and seeing,” not least because any serious threat from outcomes of a no-deal will now officially be postponed until July 2021 (thanks to a grace period on any additional import documentation). Olivier Staub, Investment Director of Cult Wines is equally relaxed on the subject of the UK’s political separation from Europe: “The UK has been importing and trading wine for over 500 years,” he observes, “as a trading hub, it is too important to European industry for things to turn nasty.”